Setting Up Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) on RHEL/CentOS 7/6

Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) is an Open Source, collaborative platform for email servers, developed in two editions, Open Source edition (Free) and Network Edition (Paid), which provides services such as LDAP, SMTP, POP and IMAP, webmail client, calendaring, tasks, antivirus, antispam and others.

This tutorial describes how to install Zimbra Collaboration Suite Open Source Edition on a CentOS/RHEL 7 server.

Requirements

An external DNS server with both A and MX valid records to point to your Zimbra mail server IP Address.

After the service has been removed issue the ss command in order to check if other daemons incompatible with Zimbra service, such as LDAP, httpd, dovecot are running on your system. If that’s the case remove them as well.

After a series of system checks the installer will prompt you to accept the license. Agree the license (y) in order to continue further with the installation process.

# ./install.sh
OR
# ./install.sh --platform-override [On different platforms other than RHEL]

Sample Output

Operations logged to /tmp/install.log.12951
Checking for existing installation...
zimbra-ldap...NOT FOUND
zimbra-logger...NOT FOUND
zimbra-mta...NOT FOUND
zimbra-dnscache...NOT FOUND
zimbra-snmp...NOT FOUND
zimbra-store...NOT FOUND
zimbra-apache...NOT FOUND
zimbra-spell...NOT FOUND
zimbra-convertd...NOT FOUND
zimbra-memcached...NOT FOUND
zimbra-proxy...NOT FOUND
zimbra-archiving...NOT FOUND
zimbra-core...NOT FOUND
PLEASE READ THIS AGREEMENT CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THE SOFTWARE.
ZIMBRA, INC. ("ZIMBRA") WILL ONLY LICENSE THIS SOFTWARE TO YOU IF YOU
FIRST ACCEPT THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT. BY DOWNLOADING OR INSTALLING
THE SOFTWARE, OR USING THE PRODUCT, YOU ARE CONSENTING TO BE BOUND BY
THIS AGREEMENT. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO ALL OF THE TERMS OF THIS
AGREEMENT, THEN DO NOT DOWNLOAD, INSTALL OR USE THE PRODUCT.
License Terms for the Zimbra Collaboration Suite:
http://www.zimbra.com/license/zimbra-public-eula-2-5.html
Do you agree with the terms of the software license agreement? [N] y

10. Next, the installation process will prompt you a series of questions in order to configure zimbra daemon properly. Use the below installation excerpt in order to setup zimbra service further.

11. Next, it will ask you to install the zimbra packages, press Y to install all.

Select the packages to install
Install zimbra-ldap [Y] y
Install zimbra-logger [Y] y
Install zimbra-mta [Y] y
Install zimbra-dnscache [Y] y
Install zimbra-snmp [Y] y
Install zimbra-store [Y] y
Install zimbra-apache [Y] y
Install zimbra-spell [Y] y
Install zimbra-memcached [Y] y
Install zimbra-proxy [Y] y
Checking required space for zimbra-core
Checking space for zimbra-store
Checking required packages for zimbra-store
zimbra-store package check complete.
Installing:
zimbra-core
zimbra-ldap
zimbra-logger
zimbra-mta
zimbra-dnscache
zimbra-snmp
zimbra-store
zimbra-apache
zimbra-spell
zimbra-memcached
zimbra-proxy
You appear to be installing packages on a platform different
than the platform for which they were built.
This platform is UNKNOWN_64
Packages found: RHEL7_64
This may or may not work.
Using packages for a platform in which they were not designed for
may result in an installation that is NOT usable. Your support
options may be limited if you choose to continue.
Install anyway? [N] y

Step 6: Zimba Initial Configuration

14. After the installation finishes, open a web browser and navigate to your domain name or IP address of the machine running zimbra service, on port 7071 via HTTPS protocol, accept the certificate security error and login with the credentials configured during the installation process. The default username for Zimbra Admin web panel is admin.

https://mail.centos7.lan:7071
or
https://192.168.1.14:7071

Zimbra Login

15. Once logged in the admin web console you can start adding your own SSL certificates, create mail accounts, mail aliases and so on. Just remember that the port 7071 is used only for administrative tasks.

Clients can securely login to their webmail boxes using the domain name or the server IP address via HTTPS protocol.

https://mail.centos7.lan
or
https://192.168.1.14

User Webmail Login

User Webmail Dashboard

Congratulations! Now you have a full operating mail stack installed on your premises.

Step 6: Remove or Uninstall Zimbra

If you wish to uninstall Zimbra service alongside with its components run the installer script with the -u option.

# ./install.sh -u

To delete Zimbra installation archive and directory run the below commands:

# cd
# rm -rf zcs-*

As a final note, in order to run Zimbra Collaboration Suite properly, you need a powerful machine with a minimum requirement of 4GB of RAM.

First of all thank you for your tutorial, i tried to install this setup on CentOS 7 several times, but every-time i can not open the admin portal on 7071? all services are running, but i can not see that zimbra is listening on the port, any expirience on such problems?

What’s the output of netstat -tlpn command? Can you see Zimbra ports listening on your network interfaces IP addresses? To open firewall port use the following command:
firewall-cmd –add-port=7071/tcp –permanent
firewall-cmd –reload

Or try to disable the firewall for a while and check if you can connect to zimbra port from brwoser:
systemctl stop firewalld

Excellent article. Everything went smooth during install. However when I tried to access on the browser I get nothing, just a browser message that the site cannot be reached. I have pinged by ip and hostname and both ping ok. I have tried to browse by both too and no luck. Obviously I am missing something.

Setting up an A record, a MX or SPF record highly depends on your domain name registrar or ISP who provides the DNS service. Pay a great deal of attention to these types of DNS records on a public domain name because your mail servers can be abused by spammers or you”ll end-up in a spam blacklist.

I am new to linux ,i have installed the ZCS as shown in the article,but after installing the ZCS ,i am not able to recive the mail from each other.also i am not able to understand how u have done the ip mapping in this installation.you have used different ip in the cli and different ip in web browser.